Wanted

Angelina Jolie is one hot mama. She exudes a sexy confidence virtually unmatched by any actress working today. She, simply put, has swagger.

And all that swagger is on full, fleshy display in Wanted, one wacked-out train ride of an action movie.

It is the pure definition of mindless, the laws of physics non-existent in this fantasy realm of bloody violence.

The film centers on Wesley Gibson (Scottish actor James McAvoy using a very fine American accent), an account manager wiling away his miserable life in an dead-end job, living in an apartment that rumbles because of the train rushes along just above, and stuck in a relationship with a girlfriend who's sleeping with his best friend.

He doesn't care about anything, and that fact alone is what concerns him.

Into his life walks Fox (played by Jolie), telling him that his father was in a secret organization of assassins and that he's about to be killed by the same guy who murdered his dad.

So begins Gibson's journey from wimp to assassin, a brutal one filled with beat downs and bloody hands while learning how to shoot a target on a curve.

Morgan Freeman is Sloane, the leader of what's called The Fraternity, an ancient organization that get messages in looms on who to kill, the idea being the person they kill today could mean saving thousands of lives later.

Okay, doesn't make much sense considering that this crew of assassins missed out on Stalin, Hitler and Idi Amin. Stuff it. Logic doesn't exist here, at least not in the world that director Timur Bekmambetov.

Instead, Bekmambetov is interested more in octane-fueled action filled with ridiculous stunts, like the one with the car flipping over a bunch of police cars and then landing on the side of a bus as it turns over and then driving off. Yeah, that happens in real life.

Again (repeat like a mantra), logic doesn't exist here.

Taking elements of The Matrix and other action movies, Bekmambetov has created a cool action flick that entertains with a little bit of good acting thrown in.

McAvoy gives his Gibson enough of that regular guy shtick to make us root for him every step of the way. His character does the things that all of smucks who want more out of life wish we could do.

And Jolie, as Fox, sizzles every time she's on the screen, making all of us guys real jealous of Brad Pitt. Lucky bastard.

The Incredible Hulk

Ang Lee's The Hulk was a brilliant, messy failure, an ambitious flop of monumental proportions. Instead of the full-fledged superhero flick many had hoped for, Lee's film was more focused on damaged father-son relationships and suppressed emotional drama that flared up in grass-colored skin and ever-bulging muscles. And the last half-hour was nothing more than a therapy session masquerading as a climactic fight scene ending in a mass bubble of angst being blown away by missiles (yes, that's what literally happened).

The idea of rebooting such a critical and commercial disaster seems an impossible task, close to crazy in fact. But Louis Leterrier, the director of The Transporter 2 and Unleashed, has succeeded where Ang Lee five years ago failed.

Armed with a great cast that's led by Edward Norton as the tortured soul Dr. Bruce Banner, Leterrier ditches the psychoanalysis and cuts to the action. And boy does this movie have action.

We don't have to wait almost an hour before Banner starts bursting out of his clothes and gets all green on us. It happens within the first 40 minutes of the movie.

The origin story is told in the opening credits. The movie opens with Banner as a fugitive working at a bottling company in Brazil and trying to come up with a cure. Hot after him is General Thaddeus Ross, who considers Banner's body the property of the U.S. government. Soon, he's found out, and the chase begins, from Brazil back to the United States.

Emil Blonsky, played by Tim Roth, is an aging soldier who gets a glimpse of The Hulk and wants some of that power. Eventually, he bulks out and becomes the menacing, even more frightening The Abominator.

Leterrier knows that audiences want to see Hulk smash, and Hulk does indeed smash a lot. This is a darker Hulk, much scarier in his power. The action is swift, and Leterrier keeps a nice, rollicking pace.

Elements of the old television show, the one with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, sneak in. We hear the haunting "Lonely Man" theme, and when Banner changes into the Hulk, his eyes go green. And Ferrigno himself makes a memorable cameo.

What the television show got right and what the movie includes is Banner's overwhelming angst over this dark side of himself, this rage that makes him rip his clothes. Norton plays that well. We feel for Banner and his unending struggle to keep himself under control.

Liv Tyler does a good job as Betty Ross, Banner's girlfriend, though here she mostly acts with her incredibly expressive eyes, all flush with emotion.

William Hurt brings heft to his role as General Ross, and Roth is great as Blonsky.

And plus, this movie is a lot of fun, with sprinkles of humor here and there, something mostly missing in Ang Lee's version.

Reports have surfaced that Norton is none too happy about this version of the movie. He had lobbied for a longer, more dialogue-intensive version, but the studios nixed it. And this time, I have to agree with the studios. The movie is lean, it's action-oriented, it's what people want to see.

And unlike Ang Lee's Hulk, this Hulk rocks.

Sex and The City

Yes, I saw Sex and The City, and I'm man enough to admit I actually wanted to see it, to be immersed in all that estrogen. It is not unfamiliar to me, a guy who grew up in a family of women, whose nickname was Man because he was the only testosterone in the house.

So, with my friend, Tracie, along for the ride, I indulged in a movie filled to the brim with girl talk about relationships, sex and fashion.

For those who don't know, the movie is based on the HBO series of the same name, where for six seasons, we followed the lives of four fabulous women and their search for love. At the center of the drama was Carrie Bradshaw, played to perfection by Sarah Jessica Parker, the writer. We also have Miranda, the workaholic attorney, Charlotte, the ever-optimistic cheerleader of the group, and Samantha, the sexually ravenous diva and drama queen.

Together, they were fierce, always ready to love and dish dirt about it over lunch at a New York restaurant.

The movie picks up about three years after the show ended. The women are all ensconced in various relationships, particularly Carrie and her Mr. Big (played by Chris Noth, of Law & Order fame). Samantha is with her boy-toy actor in California, Miranda is with her hubby and their child, and Charlotte is enjoying bliss with her husband and adopted daughter.

All seems well in the world, even more so after Mr. Big nonchalantly pops the big question and Carrie goes out in search of the perfect wedding dress.

Without spoiling the fun, not all goes exactly as planned. Hearts are broken and vows betrayed, and the movie goes down a quite unexpected dark path.

Michael Patrick Smith, the director, has a difficult job in keeping up with four women without letting the movie drag. He does this ably, and he is only helped by a great cast.

What worked in the show works in the movie, a flavorful dish of colorful (literally, in some cases) sex talk, biting wit and hard-earned tears.

But more important than that is the fact that women are at the center of the action, not mere centerpieces. These are grown women dealing with grown-up issues in ways both mature and childish, blossoming and wilting in the ebb and flow of what we like to call life.

And in this movie, we see these women coming into their own, finding their own way, taking responsibility for their mistakes and moving on, in exceptional heels, of course.

So, yeah, I saw it and I liked it. I'm man enough to admit it, though it does help to have a beautiful woman to see it with.

Indiana Jones

Action films these days are nothing more than special-effects-laden excuses to spend money to make money, hoping audiences will see past the lack of character development or plot to plop down their hard-earned dollars for empty entertainment.

So to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is to immerse yourself into something that feels like worthwhile pop entertainment, a rollercoaster ride of the senses, an escape from the earth-bound concerns of life.

You are transported and thus reminded of the reasons why you started going to the movies in the first place.

Steven Spielberg is a master of this, though oftentimes clumsy and not at all poetic. But you don't go to an Indiana Jones movie for poetry. You go to see that fedora and that whip and his wild adventures to find gnarly treasure.

In 1981, with Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg and George Lucas created a new template for blockbuster movies, grabbing your attention from the first frame and not letting go until the very end. Jones was a rough-and-tumble archeologist who loved field research, the ones where he ran from big rolling rocks and ducked bullets with a wink of his eye and a smirk on his face. And he had his female students swooning enough that one had the words "love you" etched on her eyelids.

In this third sequel, 19 years in the making, Harrison Ford is back in his iconic role, his face bearing the weathered look of the 65-year-old man he is today. Don't fret. Ford eases back into character and cracks his whip with the same snap as he did when Indiana Jones first burst on the scene in 1981.

This time, he's just narrowly escaped from his new enemies, the Communists (the movie is set in 1957, and the Nazis are long gone), and he comes back to his job as a professor only to find he has been fired. Preparing to go on a long vacation, Jones bumps into Mutt Williams, ably played by hot-new talent Shia Lebouf, who tells him about a long-lost colleague, Professor Oxley.

Jones and Williams, a greaser given to sliding a coke-drenched comb through his hair, head to Peru to start looking for Oxley and the mystery behind the Crystal Skull, an artifact that might maintain the keys to other-worldly knowledge. The Russians are after the skull as well.

Near escapes and gunfights ensue, and in the middle of all this, Marian Ravenwood, Mutt's mother and Jones' one-time lover from the Raiders of the Lost Ark days, returns, wanting to slap and kiss Jones all at the same time.

Spielberg crafts his action set pieces with panache, a brilliant mix of hilarity and tingly suspense. Jones hasn't lost his wit, and Lebouf infuses the film with a nice youthful energy.

The special-effects don't overwhelm the movie, although there is one vine-swinging scene that looks awfully fake. The story doesn't make much sense, with lots of X-Files mumbo-jumbo, but who cares.

This is all about adventure and love and the space between the spaces. Here, we look for magic, and Spielberg gives it to us in abundance, the movie never really dragging even if it goes for more than two hours.

You find yourself lost in another world, hoping you never have to come back.

Iron Man

Long ago, in some distant time called my childhood, I had an eclectic comic book collection. I never took good care of them, the pages being a bit tattered. The collection is gone now, but one stands out in my mind, and that's Iron Man. The first panel of that comic book had Tony Stark slumping at his desk, a nearly-empty bottle of alcohol close by. I was hooked.

So I had to see the big-screen version of Iron Man that opened Friday. Just had to.

Now these days, super hero movies from the Marvel comics pantheon haven't fared well, except for the first two Spiderman movies, Hellboy and all of the X-Men movies. Many of us fans choose to forget Ang Lee's angst-filled Hulk or the horribly executed The Punisher and Daredevil.

Thank God for Robert Downey Jr., who steps into the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man. He's an actor's actor.

Plus, it helps that he has this backstory of being a drunken, drugged mess of a man once upon a time. That past makes him the perfect person to play the boozing playboy billionaire genius Tony Stark is.

He's quick with the quips and loves a good time, especially if it involves a romp in the sack with a gorgeous gal. Stark is head of Stark Industries, the largest weapons-maker in the world. He's amoral, with no concern for making profit out of war.

That is until he ends up being kidnapped by Middle Eastern terrorists in Afghanistan, his heart connected to a carburetor to keep shrapnel from penetrating it. Stark realizes that his weapons are being used by his country's enemies to do evil.

Well, he builds himself a suit, makes his escape and then builds a better suit, a sleeker, shinier one colored with hot-rod red, and becomes Iron Man.

Yes, it all sounds silly, but then again, all comic books are that way. But the dialogue, for a change, is sharp and witty, and Downey gives the movie the sort of dramatic oomph you don't see in many blockbusters.

The chemistry between him and Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays his red-headed assistant Pepper Potts, is one of the best things about the movies. And you can't go wrong with Jeff Bridges, who plays the sly villain Obadiah Stane. Terrence Howard is a bit underused but more than makes his presence known.

Jon Favreau, the director, gives the film a subversive, independent feel to the movie, even if it is all a bit predictable. The special-effects serve the plot well, though the climax is a disappointment.

The ending, however, which of course makes room for the inevitable sequel, is a hoot. I can hardly wait for Downey to suit up yet again.

Baby Mama

I'm not exactly sure when "baby mama" replaced "mother" or "wife" as a term of endearment, but it is firmly established in the pop culture lexicon. And it was only a matter of time before a movie called Baby Mama was made.

Thank God it's a movie starring Tina Fey, the sexiest female comedian working these days, and one of the sharpest.

Here, Fey plays a hard-working career woman who at 37 realizes she really wants a baby, especially after she keeps bumping into one cute infant after another in her daily walk. But she has no man and can't adopt a child.

So she decides on the best next alternative: She hires a woman to be her surrogate. That woman, Angie, is played by Amy Poehler. Angie is the exact opposite of Fey's character, Kate. She's pretty much white trash, with a "common-law husband," and no manners.

Poehler and Fey have great chemistry, and the movie fleshes out the characters so they aren't simply stereotypes. We find depth in both of them.

Granted, the trajectory of the movie is rather predictable, especially after Kate bumps into Rob, played by Greg Kinnear, the owner of a fruit drink shop.

Steve Martin is wonderful as Kate's boss, a New Age CEO given to finding the essence of a shell and giving his employees the reward of staring into his eyes for five uninterrupted minutes.

The razor-sharp writing and the strong cast keep the movie on a steady pace to the inevitable end, thus giving some fresh meaning to "baby mama."

Stop-Loss

Five years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. Five years later, the United States is still there, the violence seemingly getting worse. More than 4,000 soldiers are dead. The war is a major issue in the presidential race, the two Democratic candidates arguing for withdrawal and the presumptive Republican nominee saying we need to stay and not so easily admit defeat.

In her new movie, Stop-Loss, Kimberly Pierce, best known for her 1999 film Boys Don't Cry, goes beyond the rhetoric by focusing on the soldiers, their pain and struggles, the cost they pay for fighting a seemingly endless war.

In the film, Ryan Phillipe plays Brandon King, a soldier who has already seen two tours in Iraq. This last tour ended with several of his men dead in an ambush. King returns home to Texas, anxious to start a new life and leave the war back in Iraq.

But he can't quite escape. As soon as he's home, he's told he has to go back. King has been stop-lossed, a policy that allows the military to ship back soldiers even if their contract is up. The policy of stop-loss is essentially a back-door draft to make up for the shortage of soldiers.

King is livid. He's served his country long enough. He's seen too many awful things. His buddies are already struggling to adjust to a life that doesn't involve dodging bullets or seeing friends blown up by IEDs.

King decides, against the wishes of his best friend, Steve, played by Channing Tatum, to go AWOL, jumping in the car with Steve's girlfriend, and heading to Washington, D.C.

Along the way, he and his buddies deal with the boiling emotions felt by many veterans just returning home from war, the guilt and anger and post-traumatic stress disorder, the too-vivid images of death and destruction they have witnessed, the sheer senselessness of war itself.

To Pierce's credit, this isn't knee-jerk anti-war. These characters are red-blooded Americans who rushed to join the military and fight, like many did, after 911. As one character says, we might as well kill 'em in Iraq so we won't have to kill 'em in Texas.

The film's power is in how it shows these men's strong patriotism slowly disintegrate into frustration, confusion and disillusionment. They don't understand why they're fighting or more importantly, how long.

King, the moral center of the movie, fights within himself the sense of loyalty he has for the military and his friends and the feeling, ever growing inside him, that he just doesn't want to fight anymore, that he's done his time and he needs to move on.

The movie is melodramatic in some places, but the performances are strong, the tears well-earned. Pierce has pulled together a poignant movie that refuses to beat you over the head with its message. It just tells a story, making the personal very much political.

Meet The Browns

I love Angela Bassett. She, to this black man, is the epitome of strong black woman, providing support for her man but not afraid to walk away if she feels in anyway disrespected. Her eyes flash with anger one moment and soften with tears in the next.

Her chiseled physique belies the emotional strength she has within. She is a woman in all her complexities, human in the most beautiful way possible.

And that's why I was happy to see her in a leading role, something Bassett hasn't had in quite some time, underservedly so.

In Tyler Perry's new movie, Meet The Browns, Bassett plays Brenda, a single mother struggling to raise her three kids. Bills are piling up, and she can hardly afford daycare for her youngest. And just when things couldn't get any worse, she's laid off after the company she works for moves jobs overseas.

Tragedy provides the silver lining. She gets a letter telling her that the father she never knew has died and she needs to come to Georgia for the funeral.

When she arrives, she meets Leroy Brown, who is given to wearing too-tight shirts and pants that look like they were made from multi-colored quilts, and his crazy family.

As with all other Tyler Perry movies, there's a message, or at least a couple of them about faith in God and importance of family. Perry has always managed to mix in over-the-top humor with soap-opera drama effectively.

But he ultimately fails in this movie. The writing and direction feels rushed and forced. Some laughs are to be had, but many of the jokes fall flat.

Rick Fox is Angela Bassett's love interest, a former pro-basketball player trying to help her 17-year-old son improve his basketball skills for a shot at the pros while also trying to woo Brenda's heart. Fox, however, isn't the greatest actor, and the two fail to light any sparks.

And the problems are too simply solved in this movie. Now, no one expects realism from Perry, but we also don't expect to see one character get shot in one scene and run up and down the court like nothing happened in the next. We don't expect silly little obstacles in a burgeoning romance crop up that go away as easily as brushing some dust off the countertop.

When that happens, why root for anyone? You know things are going to work out anyway. Just give it five minutes.

The script feels as if it was undeveloped, and by the time the movie ends, you sense something is just missing. At the very least, you end up with stiff dialogue and contrived situations.

That's not to say the movie wasn't entertaining. It was. But after last year's much-better made Why Did I Get Married, arguably Perry's best movie to date, I came away from Meet The Browns disappointed and expecting more.

And Angela Bassett, my future wife if she ever divorces Courtney B. Vance (not likely at all), deserves better.

Persepolis

Out of pain comes art, often engaging visceral art, and that maxim is no doubt true of Persepolis, a beautifully rendered animated feature based on Marjane Sarapti's graphic novel of the same name.

It is set in Iran during the Islamic revolution, and Sarapti is but a nine-year-old child, rambunctious and still somewhat innocence.

But that innocence is shattered, as she learns about the brutal tyranny of the Shah. People all around her are rising up to overthrow the Shah and his dictatorship.

And the Shah does fall, but replaces that dictatorship, as Sarapti and her family quickly learn, is far worse. Fundamentalists impose their own vision of how life should be and brook no dissent. Women cover themselves in veils and are expected to be silent. Sarapti, however, can't keep her mouth shut, and as a result, she gets into plenty of trouble.

These are dangerous times, and her family eventually send Sarapti off to Austria for school, to protect her and give her a chance at a life.

Sarapti becomes a woman, finds her voice and discovers punk rock. She falls in love and has her heart broken, and soon, realizes, that as much as she hates Iran, she loves it, and returns.

But things haven't improved, and though she finds a way to thrive, she leaves again, knowing she cannot live within the limits the Iranian government proscribes.

Sarapti and the director Vincent Paronnaud have imbued this story, as painful as it often is, with a sharp and biting sense of humor. The political is balanced with the personal. We learn large chunks about Iranian history but we never lose site of Sarapti's intense struggle to be who she is in a society that doesn't always accept her.

We find here an Iran that we both love and hate, a country filled with horrific violence but also love. This is the message Sarapti sends over and over again throughout the movie: home is home, no matter how much it hurt you, how much it abused you. You have a connection to your home that cannot be denied. It is a physical place but home also exists in your mind and heart and cannot easily be forgotten.

And neither will you, once you see this movie.

Thriller

As a child, Michael Jackson scared me. On the night his 15-minute epic music video premiered, I ran into the bathroom, too frightened to see his nails turn into claws or whiskers come out of his skin as sweet-voiced Michael Jackson transformed into a werewolf before the lovely eyes of Ola Ray.

And those yellow eyes with the black slit chilled me to the core.

Yet, as scared as I was, I couldn't stay away. I wanted to see Michael sing and dance, work that magic that only he could do.

In the 1980s, Michael Jackson was the man. He could do no wrong. He was supernaturally gifted, his feet blessed by God to move in ways no mere mortal could. His voice, velvety in its soaring falsetto, floated easily over pop melodies, assured in its force, measured in its power.

His music videos were main events, families gathering around the television set to see what this wunderkind would come up with next to thrill us and take us on that Disney-like musical journey.

And believe it or not, no one, no one, was ashamed to do the moonwalk. Hell, we struggled to make our feet glide as smoothly as his. We wanted to be Michael, both Jackson and Jordan, though I stopped at getting a jheri curl (ain't no hair of mine gonna drip).

And now Thriller, his mega-selling album, a classic that remains relevant today, is 25 years old. Michael Jackson will turn 50 this year, and a lot has changed.

Usher, Chris Brown and Justin Timberlake, clearly inspired by MJ, have taken the mantle of pop entertainers, combining song and dance into one irressistable package.

And the man himself? I am still scared of him, but for different reasons. He hasn't transformed into a werewolf but merely a caricature of youth refusing to mature. His narrow nose, his straightened hair, and his lightened skin have long erased the handsome young man we used to know. Allegations of child molestation and just plain bizarre behavior distract and disgust us so much that memories of MJ's greatness fade.

I hardly believe Thriller is 25 years old. Such a lifetime ago it seems, when we believed in the magic of entertainment, that we saw Michael Jackson as some supernatural entity.

We didn't see, though, that he was only human. Not God, not a freak, but pain in flesh, flawed beyond what we could even imagine, hidden for far too long behind our own hopes and dreams all encased inside one man.

For me, Thriller still thrills, fills me with the innocence of childhood, a time when adult concerns seemed far away and I could fear in the confines of my home the evil monsters out to get me. And that magic was possible.

Atonement: Hated It

I walked into Atonement with high expectations, fed by Oscar buzz and a friend's recommendation.

I left disappointed. The tale told here is sad and tragic, and Joe Wright, the director, milks the pathos for all it is worth. The cast is filled with bright actors such as James McAvoy and Keira Knightly and newcomer Saoirse Ronan who give pitch-perfect performances.

The problem lies in the story, or more accurately, in how the story is told. Going back and forth in time, we learn about the unrequited love of Cecillia and Robbie, whose lives are forever damaged by the lie told by Cecillia's sister, Briony.

It is a lie that lands Robbie in prison and then in the middle of World War II while Cecillia works as a nurse treating injured soldiers. Over several years, we see the two come teasingly close to living happily ever after before being torn apart by circumstances beyond their control.

And at the center of their unhappiness is Briony, a prickly little girl whose narcissistic quest for attention leads her to ruin two people's lives. The rest of her life is spent trying to seek some kind of penance.

But I never quite muster any kind of sympathy for Briony or her guilt. Not once does she ever come forward to tell the truth. The pain of other people are mere canvases for her to tell the stories she never got to write fully as a child.

And though James McAvoy and Keira Knightly pour themselves into their roles with an incredible fervor, the weight of their tragedy lives never grasped me. The non-linear narrative wasn't as effective as Joe Wright thought it could be in painting a portrait of painful consequences stemming from one awful lie.

In fact, it was distracting, keeping one at a distance instead of drawing one into the interior lives of these characters.

And Briony, when we encounter her at the end as a dying novelist still trying to salve her guilt, comes across not sad but pathetic, a coward who couldn't be bothered with the bravery to tell the truth.

I certainly may be wrong in my conclusion, and if I am, there is much to atone for. But I just didn't get it.

The Case of the Sad Movie

Films are pretty bleak these days, and Robin Givhan, award-winnng fashion writer for The Washington Post, tells us why. Bleak is good but today, even though I should watch There Will Be Blood, which has managed to sneak into my little city of Winston-Salem, I opted for more fun fare, namely the dance movie with heart, How She Move.

Cloverfield

YouTube is the new diary, or so it seems in Cloverfield, a Godzilla-like monster movie tailor-made for a generation used to video-taping their lives.

Here, we follow a group of successful 20 something Manhattans celebrating one of their own who has nabbed a cool new job in Japan.

The revelry is caught on tape as a guy named Hud lugs around a video camera. Partying soons turns into running when power outages and earthquakes intrude.

Turns out a monster is terrorizing Manhattan, knocking down buildings and beheading the Statue of Liberty.

Everything, and I mean everything, is seen through Hud's eyes via the camera. The result made my friend's head hurt. But it also gives the film a surreal touch in the first hour or so, leaving the audience with only glimpses of the mysterious monster stomping his way through the city.

The acting isn't Oscar-worthy in the least, and most of the characters are either forgettable or immensely annoying, like Hud.

But the feeling of dread is ever-present, a steady knot in the stomach, with the occassional kick in the gut when the monster gets a little too close to the camera.

Produced by Alias-creator J.J. Abrams and directed by Matt Reeves, Cloverfield is a throwback to the Godzilla movies of the past with some edge.

Does everything make sense? Of course not; this is a monster movie, and you yell at characters who insist on going toward the monster instead of away. And the small efforts at character development don't work. We don't see these films to care about people; we see them to see people get sidewiped by big teeth and sharp claws.

And on that front, the movie delivers, a gnarly scarefest with an indie spirit.

First Sunday

Some have called David Talbert the next Tyler Perry, though he scoffs at such comparisons.

And for good reason. His first film, First Sunday, isn't nearly as preachy as many of Tyler Perry's films. Nor is it as funny.

Ice Cube, who seems to have a permanent scowl etched on his face, is Durell, an ex-con trying to keep his baby mama from leaving Baltimore for Atlanta with his son. Durell can't leave the state because of his probation.

His sidekick is LeeJohn, played by Tracy Morgan, a comic blessed with often manic energy.

Durell's girlfriend needs about $17,000 to pay off her debts and keep her from leaving. And LeeJohn is indebted to some Jamaican gangsters.

They hatch a plan to rob the local church. As is often the case, the plan goes haywire and they end up taking the pastor and a bunch of church members hostage. Hilarity ensues.

Well, not as much as one would hope, unfortunately. Tracy Morgan manages to get some laughs, but the real star of this movie is pimp-worshipping comedian Katt Williams, who plays a effeminate choir director. His facial contortions are a hoot, and the script gives him the best lines.

When Williams appears on the screen, there's a guaranteed belly laugh or two.

Loretta Devine, as the church secretary, has one sweet, tear-inducing scene with Morgan's character.

Talbert does a decent job of pulling out some good performances out of the actors, who include the always-great Chi McBride as the pastor, Malinda Williams as his daughter and Regina Hall as Durell's ex-girlfriend. Plus, the movie thankfully moves along at a rapid pace, before the audience can even begin to detect the obvious holes in the plot.

Somehow, despite the problems, Talbert manages to effectively slip in positive messages about faith and accountability in a movie dependent on the most part on very broad comedy.

But Talbert hasn't mastered the formula yet, and by the end, the movie all but falls apart, with a sappy happy ending that just doesn't feel earned. Which means that instead of saying Amen after walking out of the theater, you might be more apt to say what a shame.

Juno

Juno MacGuff is what every girl would want to be at 16, if she had her dialogue written for her by snappy ex-stripper turned wunderkind writer Diablo Cody. Well, except she's pregnant by her kind-of boyfriend Paulie Bleeker and she finds her adoptive parents through the classified section.

Somehow, this all holds together in Jason Reitman's wonderfully realized Juno. Named after the queen of the Roman gods, Juno is a smart-alecky teenager with a snappy comeback for everyone. And when she is unexpectedly pregnant, she deals with the situation in her own plucky way. After being scared away from the abortion clinic, she finds Vanessa and Mark. Vanessa, played by Jennifer Garner, desperately wants to be a mother. Mark, played by Jason Bateman, may or may not be ready.

Backed by her no-nonsense father and kick-ass stepmother, Juno maneuvers through her nine-months of pregnancy. Ellen Page gives an audience-pleasing performance that revels in Juno's hyperarticulate banter, but the real joy that Page provides is her slowly tearing away the facade Juno's snarkiness hides. She's just a girl still not sure who she is. She wonders if she is in love and she is naive to the complexities of adult relationships.

Reitman balances the laughter with the pathos. My only quibble is that sometimes Juno is too smart-alecky, making it hard to relate to her. After all, real teenagers don't talk like this. At least I didn't when I was that age and no one I knew did either.

Dawson's Creek had this problem. The teenagers gave impossibly eloquent soliloques reminiscent more of Shakespeare than any of the slang-driven drivel one expects of young people these days. Juno's comebacks are entertaining but surreal, and keep her at arms length for most of the film.

Nonetheless, you do begin to care for her, as Diablo Cody's script begins to reveal the confused teenager underneath all of the tough talk.

And then this all becomes real and touching and poignant. And every girl will want to be just like Juno. Well, maybe they'll skip the unplanned pregnancy part, though.

The Great Debaters

In college, I relished debate. After all, college was the best place for it. Those four years gave one time and space to hash out with others all those great ideas, to engage with those who saw the world differently from your own, to have your mind changed or not. But more important than anything, college was the time where you found your voice and figured out what you believed in. And if you didn't, well, at least you had a good enough time about which you could tell your children and grandchildren years from now.

I was reminded of those long-ago college years of mine as I watched Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters. I remembered that sweet thrill of both of hearing scintillating new ideas and seeing beautiful young ladies.

Yet, there's more here than fun college times in this movie. We are taken to Marshall, Texas, where on Wiley College, Denzel Washington's Melvin Tolson is trying to mold the young minds of black students in 1935, a time when Jim Crow segregation was at its height.

Washington's second directorial effort tells the mostly true story of Tolson's efforts to revive a debate team goes virtually undefeated and eventually beats a predominantly white college team. This is your typical root-for-the-underdog kind of movie, a Rocky where the weapons are words instead of fists.

What saves the movie from sinking into soggy sap is Washington's remarkable restraint. He has confidence in the power of the story that he doesn't need to be heavy-handed here.

And the performances he draws from his young actors (Jurnee Smollett, Denzel Whitaker and Nate Parker) are good. Nate Parker's Henry Lowe is a hot-headed womanizing drunk with a natural gift at debating. Denzel Whitaker plays James Farmer Jr., an awkward young man striving to find his own voice amid the thunderous one of his scholarly and authoritarian father, played by Forest Whitaker. (Note: This is the same James Farmer Jr. who eventually grows up to found the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the premier civil-rights organizations in this country). And Jurnee Smollett, who has grown into a striking young woman since her debut years ago in Eve's Bayou, plays Samantha Booke, who has dreams of being a lawyer. All of them have their various arcs in the story, each finding the power of their words.

And at the center is Melvin B. Tolson, a professor dedicated to helping his students find and keep their righteous minds. Tolson could have been your typical motivational teacher but Washington gives him a bit of complexity that makes him vastly more interesting and bit more unpredictable than what one might expect in a movie such as this.

Tolson's not only a professor and a poet but also a radical, spending his nights organizing sharecroppers and his days being a hard taskmaster to his students.

Washington manages to retain control of all these myriad elements and merge them into a compelling narrative.

And he lets us know in subtle but hard-to-forget ways that this is not the best time to be black. One of the most powerful scenes in this movie is when Tolson and his students encounter a lynching. It's a small haunting pause to a mostly uplifting movie. But Washington puts it there to remind the audience the harsh world in which these people live, that to be black was sometimes a tightrope between life and horrific death, that to survive was an accomplishment in and of itself.

But the other part of the story is that despite those obstacles, black people like Tolson and his students dared to achieve, to be great, to be young, gifted and black.

They, of course, win, this time against Harvard (though in real life, it was actually USC). We know the win is coming, but we forgive the predictability. We've been on their journey, and thus, the victory is oh, so sweet.

I Am Legend

If by seeing I Am Legend you are hoping for a typical Hollywood blockbuster, you might slightly disappointed.

For the first two-thirds of this new Will Smith movie, there are no huge explosions, no smart-alecky hero spouting off cool one-liners. Instead, we see Will Smith barrelling down deserted Manhattan streets. Grass sprout from concrete, abandoned cars line the streets and Union Square Station sits empty. Quiet has replaced the usual noisy bustle of New York.

And Smith's Robert Neville is quite possibly the last man on earth. It has been this way for three years after a virus thought to cure cancer ended up wiping out much of humanity. All that's left are Neville and vampire-like zombies that roam the streets at night while Neville holes up with his dog, Sam, in his townhouse.

Like No Country for Old Men, this is a meditation wrapped in the framework of a thriller. Francis Lawrence, the director, gives you all the shocks to your system you'd expect from a sci-fi/monster movie.

But what's truly terrifying here is Neville's slow descent into paranoia, the disintegration of his sanity, as he continues to live day in and day out alone, his only companion being a dog.

Most of Neville's days are spent going after deer, sending out distress signals and working on a cure. At night, he quarantines himself in his house, sometimes sleeping in a bathtub with a rifle nearby, as the monsters play outside.

Will Smith has almost made a cottage industry of single-handedly saving the world, first in Independence Day and again in Men In Black, with a few cop-buddy films like Bad Boys thrown in for good measure. And in all of those movies, Smith gets by with a disarming charm and certain invincibility.

That's all gone in this movie. We see Smith vulnerable, afraid, just about to crack. His is a dark performance, similar in some ways to the one he crafted in The Pursuit of Happiness.

Yet, as he always does, he lets some light into the darkness, imbuing Neville with a likability that allows the audience to put up with him alone for long stretches of time.

It's only in the last half that the movie goes from meditative to action-packed, as the zombies move in. Unfortunately, the zombies never seen real, the CGI effects a little too obvious. And Lawrence packs the end of the movie with a heavy-handed spirituality that doesn't quite work.

Up until then, I Am Legend is a thrill ride and if you have to have someone be the last man on earth, you couldn't do worse than Will Smith.

No Country for Old Men

In No Country for Old Men, the quiet haunts. All you hear is the bark of a dog, the rush of the river or the quick whoosh of an air gun.

The quiet haunts because that is when evil flourishes, when no one can hear it. The Coen brothers relish the quiet, make effective use of silence to make the horror more real.

And that horror is in the person of Anton Chigurh, possibly the most frightening villain ever placed on screen.

It is Javier Bardem's flat expression, piercing wide eyes and few spoken words that make Chigurh so bloodcurdling cold. He is a psychopath as brutally relentless as Halloween's Michael Meyers and as twistedly logical as Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs.

And in this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, Chigurh is in pursuit of Llewelyn Moss, a loser of a welder who happens upon $2 million in drug money.

Moss takes the cash and soon starts running. But Chigurh is death personified, armed with an air gun and a hard-to-shake determination to catch his prey.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is the moral center of this tale. He is ready to retire when he hears of the mess that Moss has gotten himself into and he tries to help.

But even he knows that evil is inevitable and he has grown weary of the world he lives in, one that has gotten worse and not better the longer he breathes air.

The violence is bloody as Chigurh closes in on Moss, slaying anyone who gets in his way. But the violence isn't shocking. Instead, what turns your blood cold is the all-encompassing weight of the evil in the world.

It overwhelms everyone in its path. You can't escape it anymore than you can escape coin-tossing Chigurh.

Can evil ever be defeated, or do you at some point learn to live with it, carve out the little good you can find in this life? These are the questions In the Country of Old Men asks. They aren't easy questions, and the answers are as hard as the desolate land these characters live in.

The Coen brothers take you on a long, harsh journey where the ending isn't certain to be good. But with brilliant performances and breath-taking pacing, they have crafted a movie that stays with you.

It is the quiet haunts you, all the way down to your bones.

American Gangster

Gangsters fascinate us, at least on film. We can enjoy their outsider status, their ballsy rebellion against civilized society. Look at Scarface, Brian De Palma's epic about a Cuban immigrant who, simply by his almost reckless, in-your-face ambition, conquers the dope game and enriches himself and his family. And even when he goes down in a blaze of bullets, it is a glorious demise, his famous line, "Say hello to my little friends," etched forever in our collective memory.

So it should not surprise anyone the near-numbing buzz surrounding American Gangster, starring actor heavyweights Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe with Ridley Scott directing.

Just the names alone draw one in, but those are just cherries on top of a scrumptious dessert.

Here we see the rise and fall of Frank Lucas, a country boy from North Carolina who served as the driver and bodyguard of infamous Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson (famously played by Laurence Fishburne in Hoodlum). Bumpy was beloved in Harlem. He was a refined gangster, his brutal violence muted by his occasional philosophical ruminations and his penchant for poetry.

In 1969, Bumpy Johnson dies, and Frank Lucas decides to make a name for himself, but like Frank Sinatra, he does it his way. He has tired of begging the Mafia a cut in the heroin game. His solution is textbook profit maximization -- cut out the middleman and then put out a better product than the competition and sell it at a lower price.

Soon, he corners the heroin game, taking in a $1 million a day. As played by Washington, Frank Lucas is a Southern gentleman, one who puts family first, who takes his sweet mother (played in fine form by Ruby Dee) to church every Sunday, who dresses nice and who is way smarter than his enemies.

On his tail is Richie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe. Roberts is an honest cop, the kind who returns $1 million, even as his more corrupt brethren look at him in disgust.

Scott's film is one of parallels. The acclaimed director switches back and forth between Lucas' rise to the top and Roberts' dogged pursuit of Lucas amid struggling his personal demons.

The movie clocks in at more than two hours, but Scott keeps a quick pace, sometimes too quick.

Washington's performance is good as always, but his characterization is a bit opaque. We either see him loving his family or coldly calculating his next move, which sometimes requires a bullet in the head of some knucklehead who crossed him.

Crowe's Roberts comes across as a bit more human, his flaws and motivations clearer.

Yet, it is clear that Washington is the star. We instinctively cheer his every victory, and even when he falls, we still love Lucas. How could we not? He does what every man and woman wants to do -- win on his own terms and answer to no one. We are drawn to bad guys because they are outsiders; they find a way where there is no way to succeed. And they do it with an irresistible charm.

Frank Lucas epitomizes that, as made clear in this 2000 New York Magazine article.

Scott certainly tries to clue us in on the horrific damage Lucas wrought in his own city, the thousands of overdoses caused by his product. And he does his best to show that there are consequences to what Lucas did.

But it is all to naught. We love our gangsters, even when they lose.

30 Days of Night

Creeps come out on Halloween, particularly the bloodsucking, flesh-tearing, human-killing kind.

Vampires are the scariest of them all. But you're safe as long as the sun is out. Unless you live in Barrow, Alaska, where the sun goes down for a month, hence the title of the new movie, 30 Days of Night, the latest contribution to the vampire genre.

No, the movie doens't always make sense, and you scream at the screen a character makes the wrong move and gets his or her neck chomped on as a result.

But you don't go to horror movies for logic; you go for a jump-out-of-your-seat good time. And this movie succeeds darn well on that criteria.

Josh Hartnett plays Eben, the local sheriff who still pines for his estranged wife, played by Melissa George. They and others find themselves stranded as a band of vampires led by Marlow descend for a month of good old blood sucking.

The killings are fast and furious with lots of gore splashing everywhere. The acting is decent, and the vampires are scary.

David Slade, who directed the masterful Hard Candy, ratchets up the suspense nicely but he does start to run out of steam a bit as Day 1 stretches into Day 17.

But the movie never really drags, and the performances are enough to keep audiences engaged.

Danny Huston convinces as the lead vampire, even if he doesn't say hardly a word of English through the whole movie.

The friend I saw this movie with didn't quite like the ending. I won't give it away, but it is a bit darker than usual. But I didn't mind. It was something different, just like the entire movie.

No great meanings were gleaned from the movie, but this wasn't a deep movie anyway --- just mindless entertainment, which, by the way, is the point.

Gone Baby Gone

Ben Affleck is the slacker actor, the one who showed promise at one point long time ago but keeps making crap like Gigli while his partner Matt Damon has since gone on to box-office glory as superspy Jason Bourne.

But he may have finally, finally redeemed himself --- behind the camera instead of in front of it.

His directoral debut, Gone Baby Gone, is a near masterpiece, a brooding police procedral of surprising depth.

Based on Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name, the movie centers around 31-year-old Patrick Kenzie, a Boston native who specializes in finding people. He's effective because he knows the gritty landscape of his city. He and his girlfriend, Angie (Michelle Monaghan), are hired by a couple who want the two detectives to "augment" the investigation into their nieces' disappearance.

Their investigation is complicated in many ways, the first of which involves a drug-addicted mother whose parenting skills are lacking, to say the least.

Nothing is as simple as it seems, and the lines between right and wrong blur real quick.

Ben Affleck makes the city as much of a character as the actors. The Boston accents are thick, and he beautifully captures the rhythm of Boston slang.

We feel as if we walk the same seedy streets as Patrick, played here by Affleck's younger brother, Casey.

And that sense of place only helps the performances, especially Casey's, pop off the screen. You see everyone's flaws, but you don't necessarily hate them for it. They are fully-drawn human beings grappling with life's shades of gray where the right thing may seem like the wrong thing and the wrong thing may seem like the right thing.

Affleck reminds us in suble and not so subtle ways that the life of a little girl is at stake at every turn, and at times, the suspence is heart-stopping. But it's not just the bullets that fly that make you gulp; the decisions these characters have to make, ones morally complex with no easy answers, leave you thinking long after the final credits roll.

That Ben Affleck makes those choices palpable and believable is a testament to this beginning director's skill. The script, written by Affleck and Aaron Stockard, is a sparkling blend of rip-crackling humor and potent pathos.

Like Mystic River, also based on a Lehane novel, Gone Baby Gone haunts you with the decisions we make in life and their consequences. It haunts you because you realize that doing the right thing doesn't guarantee that everything will work out in the end. Such is life.

But Ben Affleck getting behind the camera is probably one of the best decisions he's made in quite a long time.

Why Did I Get Married

Tyler Perry has perfected what KRS-One once called edutainment. Perry knows how to sneak a message in between uproarious laughs and soap-opera drama.

Perry confounded critics when his first movie, The Diary of a Mad Black Woman, adapted from one of his many gospel plays, packed movie houses across the country.

His movies, just as his plays, combined broad, over-the-top comedy with tear-jerker drama and come-to-Jesus moments. And in the center of at least two of his movies and many of his plays was Madea, a pistol-packing grandmamma who mangled Bible verses and whipped plenty of behind.

But in his last two movies, Perry sidelined Madea, whom he played, and has managed to make more mainstream movies that still stick to his major themes about faith and giving everything to God.

His latest one centers around four couples, all college friends, who gather in Colorado to talk about their marriages. You have Patricia, a best-selling author and successful psychiatrist who seems to have a perfect marriage with her husband, Gavin, an architect.

Angela and Marcus argue all the time, mostly about Marcus' ex-girlfriend and mother of his children. Then there's Terry and Diane, who is much too busy as a high-powered attorney to spend time with her husband or her daughter.

And finally, we have Mike and Sheila, whose confidence is crushed both by her husband's adultery and his cruel words about her weight.

Over the course of the weekend, secrets are revealed, some obvious and some not so obvious. The highlight of the film is Angela, played by Tasha Smith. She is a firecracker, not afraid to say what she thinks, even if it might be the wrong time to say it. Some of the biggest laughs come from words out of her mouth.

But the real revelation is singer Jill Scott. The poetess/songstress started her career on the stage, so it shouldn't be a surprise that she can act. The pain Sheila feels is etched indelibly in Scott's face. She is the moral and emotional center of the movie, and her transformation from victim to victor is one of the most powerful story arcs in the film.

Perry has never been a subtle storyteller, aiming to tell more instead of show more. But he has become better, and the performances he gets out of his talented cast are worth the price of admission alone.

What he can't do is end this movie very well. Wounds that were opened during that Colorado weekend are too easily patched by the end of the movie. Apparently, a good cry and hug is all you need to get a marriage back on the right track. In real life, issues like adultery require a little more than that to overcome. Life ain't a sitcom.

Yet, give Perry some credit. In a world where we see people get married and divorced in a matter of months, it is refreshing to see a director like Perry point out that marriage is serious business and not something to enter into lightly.

And it's much more entertaining to sitting through an episode of Dr. Phill.

The Brave One

We deplore violence yet we cheer it. All depends on who holds the gun, or at least that seems to be the message of The Brave One, the tale of a woman who loses her sense of moral certitude when violence disrupts the illusion of the world in which she lived.

Jodie Foster plays New York public radio host Erica Bain. She has a lovely life, delivering her poetic observations about the city over the airwaves and spending time with her handsome doctor husband, David, and their dog.

Then one night, they walk through a tunnel in the park, and thugs brutally beat them both. David dies. Erica ends up in the hospital with purplish bruises on her face.

But the physical wounds don't cover her psychic ones. She is forever changed, her view of the world warped 180 degrees.

She, for the first time in her life, feels unsafe in the city she loves. And to protect herself, she finds a gun. She, as she says in the movie, is now a stranger unto herself, someone unrecognizable. She has forged an entirely new identity.

She has become a vigilante, and when she fires her gun into the thugs she encounters in the days and weeks after her attack, she learns to love the power that surges within her with every bullet that launches forward and into bad people's flesh.

Director Neil Jordan seems to be trying to say something more meaningful than those Death Wish movies of the 1970s with Charles Bronson. That something is set in Foster's steely face and sharp blue eyes, as she portrays a woman determined not to be a victim and take back some measure of the confidence she once had moving through the city.

And into this mix enters Detective Mercer, played by the always-intense Terrence Howard. Foster and Howard bring an energy and chemistry that makes everytime they appear onscreen together electric. Mercer is the moral center of the movie, a troubled man who nonetheless has tried to do the right thing and abide by the law he has sworn to uphold. It's not easy, especially when he sees the bad guys not get punished.

So we have a tension automatically between these two characters, Erica Bain, the woman willing to take the law into her own hands, and Mercer, the law man who reluctantly wants the criminal justice system to work, no matter how frustratingly slow it seems.

Jordan allows space for Foster to play her strenghths as an actress. It is within her small muscular frame that Foster creates a woman both strong and weak, hard and fragile. Erica Bain is confused about her place in the world, and her gun, in a sense, is her anchor.

But it is in the ending where Jordan fails us. This whole confrontation builds throughout the whole movie between Howard and Foster, and Jordan takes the easy way out.

No, I won't give away the ending. What I will say is that it wasn't nearly as satisfying of an ending as I was expecting. And in the end, I had little sense of what exactly the kind of message Jordan was sending. We have no clue as to what kind of person Erica Bain becomes at the end, how this violence she has experienced and has dished out has changed her.

I left the theater neither deploring nor cheering for a film that started out strong but ended as every other vigilante movie did.

The Real Michael Myers

Michael Myers was introduced to us on Halloween night in 1963. Outside a small white house in Haddonfield, Ill., Myers, only 6, watches his big sister in the kitchen, playing kissy-face with her boyfriend. Soon, they traipse happily upstairs. Tonight, with the parents gone, they want to do naughtier things than just kiss. Then, to our horror, we see tiny hands reach into a cabinet drawer and pull out a large knife.

On his way to his sister's room, Myers picks up a clown's mask, cover's his face and then encounters his topless sister. The knife descends over and over again into her flesh. Breathing heavily, Myers rushes down the steps, out the door and into the front yard, his face blank and his hands holding a bloodied knife as his mother and father look in shock.

This was the beginning of John Carpenter's slasher classic, Halloween, made in 1978 for little more than $300,000. It went on to earn more than $50 million at the box office and spawned really awful sequels.

We all remember the iconic Michael Myers, his face obscured by a white-painted Captain Kirk mask, stalking nerdy, virginal Laurie Strobe, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, and her much hornier friends on Halloween, the night when the boogeyman came out for real.

It was scary, full of jump-out-of-your-seat moments. But Carpenter was remarkably restrained. No gushes of blood, no severed heads, were to be found in this movie. Halloween is old-fashioned now in a world of Saws and Hostels, where directors depend more on shock value to frighten, instead of dread-inducing suspense.

Then Rob Zombie, the heavy-metalist turned auteur director, comes along to remake, or as he puts it, reimagine Carpenter's masterpiece. He does this by delving into Michael Myers' past, figuring out how a small boy tranformed himself into a cold, efficient killing machine who loves to wear masks.

So in Zombie's Halloween, we're introduced to Myers as a 10-year-old, chubby-faced with stringy dirty-blonde hair. His father is dead. His mother is a stripper who has since fallen in love with a drunken prick played over-the-top by William Forsythe. His big sister is an oversexed hottie. At school, Myers is mercilessly picked on by bullies, and when he starts torturing rats as a way to cry out for help, his stressed-out mother ignores the not-so-suble signs that her dear-old son may be turning into a psycho.

It doesn't take long for Myers to go from killing rats to killing people, bashing one bully with a tree branch. And then on Halloween night, he goes bonkers, cutting his stepfather's throat, pummeling his sister's boyfrined with an aluminum baseball bat and stabbing his sister 17 times.

Dr. Samuel Loomis (played in the original by the late Donald Pleasance and now replaced by Malcom McDowell) is the psychiatrist who tries to help Myers at the mental institution he is now confined to. He holds him and jokes with him with hopes to break through to Myers' inner turmoil. But it is to no avail. And 18 years later, Myers is a big brute of a man, silent and the very embodiment of evil.

The rest of the story follows just as the original -- Myers breaking out and going on a rampage through Haddonfield on a quest to find his baby sister, Laurie Strobe, this time played by Scout Taylor-Compton.

Zombie says his motivation was to humanize Michael Myers. A noble attempt but it fails. Myers was scarier when he was just a mute monster, his eyes the blackest ones Dr. Loomis had ever seen.

Here, we have just cliche. Poor Michael Myers had a crappy childhood and killing people indiscriminately is his way of lashing out. Great pschoanalysis there, Zombie.

The biggest problem here is that despite all Zombie's reimagining, we have the same-old tired Michael Myers. He doesn't say anything. He has no personality. He just walks and kills, walks and kills.

The violence is visceral and much less stylized than it was in the original Halloween. And while not as gory as some of the torture movies we've become accustomed to these days, Zombie's version is far bloodier than Carpenter's.

But the movie just feels empty and soulless, like Myers. We still don't understand what made Myers evil. And we don't care. Even sadder is the short shrift Laurie Strobe gets in this movie. Instead, she becomes a stupid girl who screams at all the wrong times.

Let's just hope for this one thing: No sequels, please.

Not Another Werewolf Movie

Werewolves fascinate me. Of course, I loved the cool idea of seeing a man sprout fur on his back at the sight of a full moon. But it was also this deeper idea of man transforming into beast, the primitive side of man being allowed to burst from the inside and roam free.

When I was young, I read these pamphlets about the making of horror movies, and one of them was about The Wolf Man, that classic starring Lon Chaney Jr. as a man who is bitten by a werewolf and becomes one himself. Amid the camp was a tragedy. We see a good man who against his better nature commits murder every time the moon is full.

A gypsy tells him what he has become and that he is destined to harm the very thing he loves. The only way he can end it all is to kill himself.

Years later, I watched An American Werewolf in London, by far my favorite of the genre. Masterfully directed by John Landis, the movie centers on two American students backpacking through Europe. A trip through the foggy and dark moors leaves one dead and another cursed with a need to feast on human flesh. The make-up effects by Rick Baker are a highlight, and the transformation scene is one of the best I have ever seen in a werewolf movie. Landis mixed in wonderful degrees humor and horror. I laughed and covered my eyes simultaneously.

But beyond The Howling, there hasn't been a decent werewolf movie in years. The Howling produced increasingly non-sensical sequels, and then there was that unfortunate sequel to An American Werewolf in London, which simply moved the horrific proceedings to Paris.

A few years ago, director Wes Craven, creator of that hilarious knife-fingered menace to teenage dreams Freddy Kruger, attempted to revive the genre with Cursed. Even with popular stars such as Christina Ricci and Jonathan Jackson, the movie more than lived up to its title, flopping at the box office. Critics thrashed it, deservedly so. The fact that it was PG-13 didn't help matters, and the special effects were horrid.

I held out hope, however small it may have been, that the recent release Skinwalkers might be the werewolf movie I have been waiting for since An American Werewolf in London. The trailers looked good, and the werewolves looked hairy and scary enough.

How wrong I was. This is worse than Cursed. The dialogue stinks and the acting, except for Elias Koteas, is awful. And the werewolves themselves look ridiculous. Instead of werewolves, they look like fur-bodied actors wearing hideous dog masks.

The story, if you can call it that, is that werewolves, here called skinwalkers, are rooted in American Indian culture. Two groups of werewolves have been battling each other for years. One group loves being werewolves while the other sees being skinwalkers as a curse.

A boy who is half-skinwalker and half-human will turn 13 at the time of the red full moon and it is he who holds the key to ending the curse of the skinwalkers.

The bad-boy skinwalkers want the kid dead, and the good ones attempt to protect him.

A potentially good werewolf movie, or a good movie period, is here somewhere in this mess. But with a clueless director (Jim Isaacs, whose last movie was the surprisingly entertaining Jason X) and a useless script full of cliche and no scares, finding that rough shape of a movie is really, really hard.

I still dream of seeing a good werewolf movie someday, one that's scary and has a cool transformation scene and a decent story. Until then, maybe I should go rent An American Werewolf of London and sing "Blue Moon" for old times sake.

Bourne Kicks Major Behind

Summers are known for sequels, and this summer has been one of threequels -- Spiderman 3, Shrek 3, The Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

Some are good and others are really, really bad. The Bourne Ultimatum just happens to be really, really good.

Again, we follow reluctant government assassin Jason Bourne as he tries to remember his past. This time, he's as close as he's ever been to figuring out the truth.

Played by Matt Damon, Bourne is brutal, jaw-droppingly so at times, but he's also remorseful. He doesn't like killing. He kills because he has to survive.

And ever since The Bourne Identity, he's been wanting to know why he kills and who made him who he is.

As always, there's someone who's chasing him and hoping he'd just die. That someone is Noah Vosen, played by David Straithairn, a CIA big-wig who runs an office in Manhattan. He is cold and calculating and willing to kill anyone to get close enough to Bourne and kill him.

Pamela Landy is the opposite, a hard-edged CIA agent with a moral center, played by Joan Allen. She begins suspecting that Bourne has been done wrong and risks her career to help him.

Under the direction of Paul Greengrass, precious little time is set aside for poignant moments or small talk. But Greengrass manages to imbue Bourne with complexities that make him more human.

Bourne isn't bond. He's a one-woman guy who still mourns the death of his girlfriend in the last film, The Bourne Supremacy. And he's no Arnold Swartznegger-like killing machine.

That doesn't mean no action. Oh, there's action. Hard-hitting, in-your-face action. Greengrass's documentary-style direction puts you in every lip-flesh-chewing action sequence. The car chases are particularly exhilarating, and you feel each smash of car metal as if you were in the back seat.

More importantly, Greengrass gives that hard-to-quantify quality we call soul. This is no simple popcorn movie that you forget once you have left the movie theater.

Bourne is doing, at some level, what all of us are doing: trying to figure out who we are and where we fit in.

Jason Bourne, in the end, is all of us searching for the truth of our lives in a chaotic world.

I Know Who Killed Me

Here, we gather to mourn the career of Lindsay Lohan. Okay, it's not that serious, just another case of a teen celebrity gone wild. First Paris and now Lindsay.

The difference is that Lindsay actually has talent, if you scrape away all the tales of wild partying, scandolous tongue-wrestling and more with boys and drunken driving.

That talent is evident in I Know Who Killed Me, where Lohan gives just a glimpse of what she can do as an actor.

Too bad it's only a glimpse, for the movie is a complete mess. Even the trailers couldn't quite hide the movie's sheer crappiness.

Lohan plays Aubrey, a studious, no-sex-having girl intent on becoming a famous writer. We see her tapping away on her keyboard and reading her work to her bemused classmates. In the small town she lives in, a girl has gone missing. Soon, the girl's body is found, causing the town folks to fear that a serial killer is on the loose.

Aubrey soon becomes the next victim. After a football game, she's abducted and tortured. She later wakes up in a hospital, missing part of her leg and part of her arm.

Here's the kicker, though: Aubrey claims to be Dakota, confusing her parents and the investigators. And Dakota isn't Little Miss Sunshine. She's a stripper whose mother was a crackhead and who now spends her nights swiveling up and down a pole and doing naughty Monica Lewinsky-like things with cigarettes.

And she loves sex, which makes Aubrey's boyfriend more than happy, as we all see in what has to be the most unintentionally hilarious sex scene to come out this year.

Aubrey/Dakota eventually sets out to find out who kidnapped her in what turns out to be a by-the-books thriller we've seen too many times before.

And the twist (there always has to be a twist in these things) is out-of-the-world absurb and so silly that you're tempted to scream at the screen, "Really? Pu-Leeze."

Lohan, however, does manage to give a decent performance as she essentially plays two people. And if the plot had been better written, this could have been a good B-movie, something tantalizing but instantly forgettable.

Instead, it is only mildly interesting for the mere fact that Lohan is, oohh, playing a stripper who manages not to take all of her clothes off. To those guys whose sole purpose in life was to see Lohan naked, this is not the movie for you.

And it really isn't much of a movie for anyone.

So, in the end, my advice to Lohan, beyond sounding like Jane Fonda and telling her to stop partying so much, is to please pick better scripts. You're not Paris. You have talent. You deserve better. Really.

Sicko: Just Plain Sick

You either love Michael Moore or you hate him. He's a big man, both literally and figuratively, who doesn't operate in areas of gray. Being subtle is not in his nature.

Anyone who has seen Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 911 knows that.

And his latest documentary, Sicko, is no different.

This time, Moore takes on America's health care system with his own bombastic sense of injustice.

Yet, this film is more effective than his others. For one, Moore isn't seen that much in the film, until the last truly over-the-top half-hour.

But a huge chunk of the movie is just about ordinary folks struggling against a confusing and profit-hungry health-care system. One man cuts the tops of his ring finger and his middle finger off and has a doctor tell him it will be a lot cheaper to put the ring finger back on than the middle finger.

We meet one couple forced to live in their daughter's storage room after medical bills causes them to lose their home.

We see a medical insurance reviewer talk about a health-insurance company that rewards those who deny claims.

And we see how better the health care systems in other industrialized countries are. You go in, the doctors treat you and you pay nothing. France, Britain, Canada and Cuba.

Moore is simply amazed, and we are as well. To Moore, other countries put a higher premium on providing health care than our own country.

In America, the premium is on making as much money as you can, and screw the little guy.

What compells you to watch is the fact that Moore, for the most part, keeps his mouth closed. He lets real people tell their stories. And many of them are heart-breaking and outrageous, the kind of stories that make you want to stomp out of the theaters and march on Washington.

The debate on health care is a complex one, but Moore,with even doses of humor and anger, boils it down to one simple question: Why can't arguably the greatest country in the world do a better job of providing health care?

It's a good question. What is Moore's answer? Well, it seems to be that we should be more like Canada, France, Britain and other countries that provide free health care.

But of course, that health care isn't exactly free. The health care is paid for through much higher taxes.

And I suspect that things aren't as tranquil as Moore makes it appear in the movie. He doesn't really explore some of the problems those health care systems have. He gives the impression of a utopia in many of those places, and I doubt that's the case.

What you can't argue with and what Moore makes abundantly clear is that the health-care system in the United States is broken. Nearly 50 million Americans have no health insurance, and the ones who do have to go through a maze of complicated rules about what can be covered and what can't be covered. Employers are increasing co-pays, meaning people are having to pay more for their health care out of their own pockets. And lord help you if you happen to have a pre-existing condition or even the sympton of one that you forget to tell your health insurance about.

There has to be a better way, and while you can quibble with Moore on the cure, you can't dispute the diagnosis: the health-care system is just plain sick.

More Than Meets The Eye

When I was a kid and still believed in Santa Claus, I asked one year for a Transformer, one of those cool toys that turned from car to robot and back again. This was the 1980s, and I, like many other kids, was enthralled by Optimus Prime, Megatron and the whole Autobot/Decepticon drama.

I guess I was a good boy because that Christmas, my wish was granted. I had a small yellow sports car that doubled as a mean fighting robot.

More than 20 years later, Michael Bay, king of attention-span-shortening action movies such as Bad Boys, The Rock and Armageddon, brings us Transformers.

Sam, played by Shia Lebouf, is a nerdy kid trying to get the hot girl. He pays $4,000 for a rusty-looking Camaro that seems to love schlocky pop music. Boy, do his eyes pop wide open when he finds out that his car is actually an alien robot named Bumblebee.

And he has a few friends named Jazz, Ratchett and Ironhide. And let's not forget Mr. Massive Truck, otherwise known as Optimus Prime.

For those who didn't grow up on the Transformers, here's the deal. The Autobots and the Decepticons once lived on this planet far, far, way far away called Cybertron. Megatron, the baddie here, decided to be a real pain and cause all this war and suffering. Oh, and there's this Cube thing that could ruin a planet or two if it got in the wrong hands. Well, the Cube ends up on earth, and the Transformers follow.

Bay has never been an artsy director. He goes for the big bangs and the quick-cutting to pump things up, and sometimes it works and oftentimes, it gives the viewer a headache.

He does tone it down some, and Lebouf is just a likable actor who pulls off funny one-liners as he deals with a weird car and a beautiful girl all at the same time.

But for all the anticpation and anxiety Transformers have had about a live-action movie, this movie is simply okay. I wasn't blown away at all and I felt a bit of numbness from all the over-the-top action.

Plus, the dialogue that the Transformers are given is just atrocious. As a friend of mine pointed out, Optimus Prime wouldn't say "My bad," as he does at one point in the movie.

As I sat for the two-hour-plus movie, I kept wanting more than what I was seeing on the screen. Some magic, the kind of magic you can't get out of throwing CGI effects here and there.

This, unfortunately, comes close to the predictable, empty and way-too commercial summer blockbusters we've grown accustomed. Product-placement becomes more important than logical plot lines and character development.

And that's a shame. One of my favorite cartoons deserved better.

Yippee-ki-yay

John McClane was the tough-talking, authority-ignoring, pain-in-the-ass New Jersey cop with the estranged wife in 1988's Diehard, an action movie that sets the standards for all action movies that followed.

As played by Willis, McClane was just a regular guy, never one to be the hero, but who manned up and got the job done anyhow. He was no muscle-bound machine-like superhero like the ones Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Swartzneggar played. He was scared out of his mind and flawed and bloodied, a man caught in an impossible situation. Maybe we couldn't relate to all the bullets flying, but we could relate and root for McClane. He had soul.

And he still does, as evidenced by Live Free or Die Hard. Sequels, by and large, suck, never living up to the spirit of the original. But this one comes awfully close.

It helps that McClane's luck hasn't changed much. His marriage is over, he still clashes with authority, and he and his now-grown daughter don't quite get along.

He's back in New Jersey, spying on his daughter and her not-quite-respectful date, when he's called to pick up a hacker named Matthew Farrell, played by Justin Long. Before long, McClane is shooting and cursing as things blow up around him, and Farrell is running after him.

Turns out a former Homeland Security employer Thomas Gabriel is still upset that his warnings about security problems went ignored. All he got for his troubles was his reputation ripped to shreds. Best thing he can do, he figures, is shut down the country's whole electronic infrastructure, knocking out cell phones, traffic lights, computers, the whole nine yards.

McClane, of course, has to stop him, and he's the perfect guy. He hates cell phones.

Len Wiseman, director of those weird Underworld movies starring his wife, Kate Beckinsale, punches up the action with eye-popping action sequences, like the one where a car flies through the air and slices through a helicopter. And the nice thing is he doesn't use a lot of fancy CGI effects. This is old-school, and it's cool.

I wish the dialogue was better, but what's there is pretty good. Long is a likable actor and he gets plenty of funny lines. Willis, at 52, still makes a believable action star, even if all the action isn't quite believable (yeah, the thing about the car slicing through the helicopter. Don't think that would happen in real life).

But this is an action movie. You have to suspend disbelief and just go for the ride.

And Live Free or Die Hard is one of the best rides out this summer.